More data fiddling – this time in NOAA’s ENSO data

Plot below showing ONI -vs- Aqua Channel 5 Temperature from lukewarmplanet (not Tisdale) to illustrate what he is talking about in his upcoming book. – Anthony

Anomaly plot along with the “ONI” (Oceanic Nino Index). In this plot ONI leads the channel 5 data by three months.

Comments on NOAA’s Recent Changes to the Oceanic NINO Index (ONI)

Guest post by Bob Tisdale

As many of you are aware, I’m writing another book. The working title is The Ignored Driver of Global Climate: El Niño- Southern Oscillation. I’m about two-thirds of the way done, I believe. There’s lots of new illustrations (so far about 70% are new), and they should help those who are having trouble understanding the processes of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

I’ve just finished a discussion of NOAA’s recent changes to their Oceanic NINO Index, also known as ONI, in the chapter about ENSO Indices. I believe you’ll find it interesting. (I’ve left the illustration numbers as they presently exist in the book draft.)

Due to a significant warming trend in the Niño-3.4 region since 1950, El Niño and La Niña episodes that are defined by a single fixed 30-year base period (e.g. 1971-2000) are increasingly incorporating longer-term trends that do not reflect interannual ENSO variability. In order to remove this warming trend, CPC is adopting a new strategy to update the base period.

NOAA does not attribute the “significant warming trend” to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, but anytime that phrase is used it implies manmade warming to many persons. Unfortunately, what NOAA has actually done with their changes is minimize the impact of the 1976 Pacific Climate Shift on NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies.

I cannot fathom why they would do that when the 1976 Climate Shift is the subject of numerous scientific studies. Google scholar has 176 returns for “1976 climate shift”, in quotes. It is an accepted, well-documented phenomenon.

The Oceanic NINO Index is based on the NOAA ERSST.v3b sea surface temperature dataset. Yup, that’s the dataset that NOAA introduced in 2008 with bias-corrected satellite data and then quickly modified, removing the satellite-based data, when “users” at NOAA discovered that the satellite data made global sea surface temperatures in 1998 warmer than 2003 by a couple hundredths of a deg C. Refer to the discussion of Figure 2-23 in Chapter 2.

Figure 4-21 illustrates the ERSST.v3b-based NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies, on which the Oceanic NINO Index data is based. The data does in fact have a positive linear trend of slightly less than 0.06 Deg C per decade. Note that I’ve highlighted 1976 to point out the Climate Shift.

So let’s look at the data before and after the climate shift.

The ERSST.v3b-based period average sea surface temperature anomalies for the NINO3.4 region from January 1950 to December 1975 and from January 1977 to May 2012 are shown in Figure 4-22. The average sea surface temperature anomalies after the 1976 Pacific Climate Shift are about 0.3 deg C higher than they were before it. By the way, that shift impacted the entire Eastern Pacific Ocean, not just the eastern equatorial Pacific.

And of course the linear trends before and after the climate shift are negative, Figure 4-23, and that implies the climate shift is responsible for a good portion of the overall positive linear trend from 1950 to present.

To “remove” the “significant warming trend” caused in part by the 1976 climate shift in the sea surface temperatures of the NINO3.4 region, NOAA no longer uses a single set of base years (1971-2000) for the anomalies in their Oceanic NINO index. They now use a series of shifting base years. They explain:

ONI values during 1950-1955 will be based on the 1936-1965 base period, ONI values during 1956-1960 will be based on the 1941-1970 base period, and so on and so forth.

The result: NOAA has eliminated the positive trend in what used to be sea surface temperature anomalies of the NINO3.4 region. See Figure 4-24. One can’t even call them sea surface temperature anomalies anymore with the sliding base years. But for now, we’ll treat them as anomalies.

With the changes, NOAA has minimized the difference in the period-average NINO3.4 sea surface temperature “anomalies” before and after the 1976 shift. Based on the “raw” ERSST.v3b data, the climate shift caused NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies to shift up 0.3 deg C, but the “corrections” dropped the shift to about 0.04 deg C, as shown in Figure 2-25.

And the changes to the way NOAA calculates sea surface temperature “anomalies” for the Oceanic NINO Index has resulted in more severe negative trends before and after the climate shift. See Figure 4-26.

I won’t speculate about why NOAA would want to minimize the effect of the 1976 Pacific Climate Shift. The reason given for the changes seems odd at best. Consider this though: There are scientific studies where the authors remove the linear effects of ENSO on global surface temperatures by simply scaling and subtracting an ENSO index from global surface temperatures. The authors then mistakenly claim the remaining trend in global surface temperatures is the result of anthropogenic global warming. This faulty method of determining the effects of ENSO on global surface temperature is discussed further in Section 6. Now, because NOAA has flattened the Oceanic NINO index trend, if someone were to use it in one of those misleading scientific studies, the remaining trend in global surface temperature residuals would be a little bit higher than if they had used a sea surface temperature anomaly-based ENSO index.

In summary, because the Oceanic NINO index no longer represents the sea surface temperature anomalies of the NINO3.4 region using a single base period, and because NOAA has minimized the impact of the 1976 Pacific Climate Shift in it, and because that climate shift exists in all sea surface temperature datasets, I, personally, would not use Oceanic NINO index as an ENSO index. Then again, I don’t believe NOAA cares one way or the other if I use their Oceanic NINO index.

INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT THE EL NIÑO-SOUTHERN OSCILLATION AND DON’T WANT TO WAIT FOR MY NEW BOOK?

About one-quarter of my book If the IPCC was Selling Manmade Global Warming as a Product, Would the FTC Stop their deceptive Ads?, Section 6, is about the processes that are part of El Niño and La Niña events. Many of the discussions are rewordings (expansions and simplifications) of my posts here at Climate Observations, so you could save a few bucks and read dozens of posts. But the book provides a single resource and reference for you and includes a very basic, well-illustrated introduction to El Niño, La Niña, and ENSO-neutral conditions written in simple terms. Included in that section are discussions of how La Niña events are not the opposite of El Niño events and how and why certain parts of the global oceans warm in response to certain El Niño AND to the La Niña events that follow them. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is a marvelous process Mother Nature has devised to enhance or slow the distribution of heat from the tropics to the poles. It is process that naturally varies in intensity, and due to those variations, it is capable of warming or cooling global temperatures over multiyear and multidecadal periods. The individual chapter titles of Section 6 will give you an idea of the topics discussed. See pages 9 and 10 of the introduction, table of contents, and closing of my book in pdf form here.

Slightly OT – but I really think everyone should check out these two threads on the Fortean Times message board, because they seem to me to personify *everything* that’s wrong and scary about the way this issue taps into the human capacity for bigotry and closed-thinking. So many intelligent people who haven’t studied this subject have such ludicrous misconceptions, a board like that is a good outreach place to try and get some real info in place

“Richard Nelson says:
June 5, 2012 at 12:26 pm
Emitting massive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere is bad. Point, who care what is does to climate. Big Oil is going down despite its effort to disinform.”

So Mr Nelson, have you actually anything to contribute to this thread?

Richard Nelson: as this is an internationally read blog, I will give you the benefit of the doubt that English is not your first language, because your three sentence missive makes absolutely no sense. If I edit it to what I think you meant, it still shows that you drink copious quantities of Mannian Kool Aid. Either that or you REALLY need to use (/sarc) tags.

Richard Nelson says:
June 5, 2012 at 12:26 pm
Emitting massive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere is bad.
=========================================================
Me: Just because you say so?
========================================================
Point, who care what is does to climate.
========================================================
Me: Point, we’ve been lied to about what it does to climate.
========================================================
Big Oil is going down despite its effort to disinform.
=========================================================
Me: You mean like the funding “Big Oil” has given to “The Team”? Maybe it’s Big Government that needs to go down?

The way the explanation reads, they are publishing anomaly data but they change the base period against which the anomaly is calculated every few years. Please, someone tell me that I read that wrong. Please.

It is becoming more and more apparent that the agencies who have been tasked with maintaining data about the climate are not up to the task. There is apparently no quality control, no data management, no configuration management, no traceability of changes made. E. M. Smith – Chiefio has been doing a forensic examination of the changes between GHCN V1 and GHCN V3 ( http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/ghcn-v1-vs-v3-1990-to-date-anomalies/ and following posts) ) This examination shows the same (to be charitable) lack of quality control.

According to the AGW protagonists, we are hazarding the very future of the human race and therefore having to spend untold trillions allowing other minor emergencies like children dying of starvation every 5 seconds to be disregarded – as the changes in the world’s climate are of overwhelming importance! Yet maintenance of the data on the climate appears to have been left to bungling amateurs who would be summarily dismissed in any field except apparently climate science. I have seen better quality control and data management in undergraduate projects.

I know the rule is to “Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.” But such repeated and widespread ineptness stretches the bounds of credibility.

Basically, the Nino 3.4 region has no trend over the longest time-scales (even reconstructions going back hundreds of years). This is extremely important because it is one of the few places on the planet that has not increased over time and it tells you something important about what this phenonmenon is – the Pacific’s thermostat.

I’ve speculated before that the reason it does not have an increase is because the adjusters have not felt they could get away with adjusting it up (until now).

There are a long series of actual ship measurements going far back in time. There is the tie-in to the Southern Oscillation Index which is carefully measured atmospheric pressure. 1877-88 was clearly a Super El Nino with well-recognized impacts around the globe. You can’t go back and adjust a Super El Nino into a La Nina. So, they had to leave these numbers alone.

The fact that NOAA and the NCDC have been getting away with all these continual adjustments in the last decades just means they now feel “brave enough” to try it with the ENSO as well.

Leave the temperature records alone (or some politician will have to come in and reorganize how things are done – we need to elect one of those).

I seem to recall a proposal to for a different way to define the ONI for comparing with past climates was suggested by Mike Palecki at an AMS meeting around 2008 IIRC. I have the link at home to his talk (which was actually quite good!) and will post it later. However, his reasons for creating a “moving ONI” seemed justifiable in context: one must balance the number of events occuring over time if one is to compare the relationship to extreme events in either kind of ENSO event. I myself created a sort of “invariant ENSO index” that would help isolate events that were large compared to their contemporary period. My motivation was that, in generating ENSO composites based on exceptional years, the claim might be made that exceptional year’s timing is cofounding a long term trend signal. With my IEI, the twenty largest ENSO negative events and twenty largest ENSO positive events since 1895 (for comparison with the US Climate Division maps) were very evenly distributed throughout the period. No one could accuse me of confounding ENSO signals with anything else. The downside being I lose some of the long term ENSO signal, and can’t estimate it’s role in multidecadal trends in US temps.

Of course, one should always be able to generate the old ONI using the old techniques and raw data. That it won’t be officially reported and won’t be officially used is unfortunate.

BTW Bob, I realize you are mainly focused on the large scale climatic effects of ENSO, rather than the weather and smaller scale patterns associated with (but not necessarily caused by) the individual events, but would you have any guesses as to why ENSO events of either sign (and again the ENSO events are identified using a normalized index so I’m not capturing a warming signal-even if it wasn’t normalized, look at the years!) seem to be associated with warm anomalies over overlapping parts of the US?

I am skeptical of any kind of an abrupt, basin wide shift of anything. Nature usually does not work that way. My major suspicion is interment calibration. That said I am not a fan of using linear trends or anomalies for much of anything either. In the attempt to simplify these things appear to create confusion and are simply more models of which we have to many now.

We need a new scientific definition for information that has been roundly filtered, pureed, adjusted, tweaked, and spiked until it no longer reflects actual reality. Some suggested terms: spooge, junk, garbage, slime….

June 5, 2012 at 12:26 pm
— — —
96 % of global emissions come from nature. The Earth needs at bare minimum about 180 ppm CO2 just to keep the plants alive, with 280 ppm being the pre-industrial level. Most of the “heat trapping” effect has taken place at this level and man’s contribution has an ever diminishing affect as per the inverse exponential (logarithmic) effect of increases concentrations. Humans are not causing catastrophic climate change / global warming.

In 1976 I happened to be navigator on a Matson ship running between the West Coast US to Hawaiian Is. and NOAA paid each watch officer to launch their probe for sea temp at various depths… Info was closely guarded….Later in 1979 we read in Scientific American magazine about a New Ice Age approaching they also called it climate change….Only thing I see in this 33 year old scenario is a bunch of pseudoscientists trying to obtain grant money because they cannot get a job teaching… All the data they have is short term….Mother Earth has been around the block a very very long time…Every phenomena has cycles…These erstwhile scientists who expect us to believe it is a new ice age in 79 suddenly expect us to believe that lately we are going to roast our asses off, and the wheat in Kansas also the corn in Nebraska will no longer be sufficient??? Thank you doctor of phylosophy , but IMO you are full of shit…

Richard Nelson: There are a multitude of grammatical and typing errors in your June 5, 2012 at 12:26 pm comment. The odd thing? You’re attempting to promote your freelance science writing business with the freelancesciencewriting.com link attached to your name. I don’t think you’re going to find many takers with your poor grammar and typing skills.

It made sense in context. Also, the work he used it for is actually quite fascinating. It would be nice to see what the graphs look like with the most up to date data. Based on prior talks, his quality control work was on going (and may still be) on the Forts data, and this lead to substantial revisions.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: “Although to properly establish the relationship, as ENSO works with whatever heat is provided by the Sun, and only what’s allowed through by the clouds, it’s as much of a ‘driver’ as a GPS unit.”

ENSO also dictates tropical Pacific cloud cover, which in turn impacts the amount of downward shortwave radiation available to recharge the Pacific Warm Pool for the next El Niño. I’ll continue to use the word driver.

We need government(s) to stop this data fiddling before all of it is ruined forever. I can think of nothing worse than changing data just because of an assumption. Climate science should be more appropriately be renamed climate assumption.

Andrew, regarding the start of your June 5, 2012 at 2:42 pm comment, ONI is intended as a means of identifying official El Niño and La Niña events. Does it really matter to most visitors to the ONI webpage that the 2005/06 La Niña did not exist in the old ONI but does in the new version? No. But NOAA has changed the surface temperature record in order to redefine ENSO, eliminating the impacts of a massive climate event in the process.

Also, thanks for the link.

You asked, “…would you have any guesses as to why ENSO events of either sign…seem to be associated with warm anomalies over overlapping parts of the US?”

Emitting massive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere is bad. Point, who care what is does to climate. Big Oil is going down despite its effort to disinform.
____________________________________
HUH???
Thanks to the increase in CO2 we have nearly doubled the production of food from one acre from 1/5 of a bushel of wheat to 1/3 of a bushel of wheat. So how the heck is that bad? As far as temperature goes, large parts of Canada and Russia and China can grow grain. If the season get too short/cold they can not.

Bye the Bye, Big oil is 100% behind CAGW and has been from the start. Maurice Strong, chair of the first Earth Summit, is BIG OIL and a senior advisor to the World Bank. Shell and BP funded CRU. Shell Oil exec Ged Davis is a big wig at IPCC. The former head of the IPCC, Robert Watson, works for the World Bank. The finger prints of Big Oil and the Big Banks are all over the Global Warming Scam because it is a HUGE money maker.

Do a bit of research instead of believing the propaganda you read in the Huff & Puff and Grauniad.

We need a new scientific definition for information that has been roundly filtered, pureed, adjusted, tweaked, and spiked until it no longer reflects actual reality. Some suggested terms: spooge, junk, garbage, slime….
________________________________
I think it has already been named as in Junk Science.

Bob Tisdale says: It would be interesting to see what different weather patterns are associated with the “different” El Niños. Is it possible to identify them before the satellite era? Because otherwise the population of total El Niños I’d be looking at would be reduced to one fifth and the associations with weather patterns would be on much weaker footing. Also there is the difficult of determining their normalized magnitudes. I’ll look into, anyway.

Also, with regards to whether one would expect ENSO anomalies of opposite sign to be associated with weather patterns opposite in sign, well, most areas of the US they do seem to. What I’m wonder is whether you know why the particular areas of the US that do experience warm anomalies during both types of events do so, not why any areas would. And perhaps why the anomalies in those areas happen to be warm during both types. Those areas have to have below average years also, but evidently no such years are represented among ENSO events that represent large deviations from their contemporary climate. Since ENSO evidently doesn’t cause the cool years, no matter the sign of the event, even (especially?) if it is a large negative anomaly, what does?

BTW, I recall trying, but not saving the results of a composite of minimal anomaly years in my IEI, which should be the “most neutral” years. I seem to recall the weather patterns associated with such were really odd.

ENSO also dictates tropical Pacific cloud cover, which in turn impacts the amount of downward shortwave radiation available to recharge the Pacific Warm Pool for the next El Niño. I’ll continue to use the word driver.

By the Willis Eschenbach Thunderstorm Thermostat Hypothesis, the amount of solar radiation received in the tropics is constrained by natural processes controlling cloud cover. ENSO works with the energy that gets through in the Pacific tropics. ENSO “dictates” tropical Pacific cloud cover in that where ENSO supplies warm water the additional energy needed for cumulus and cumulonimbus (thunderstorm) cloud formation is reduced, otherwise more energy is needed.

During the day, all of the available solar radiation is not accepted, the clouds will reject part of it. In the Pacific tropics, ENSO determines when in the day the cumulus and cumulonimbus (thunderstorm) clouds form, where ENSO operates. Thus ENSO does not appear to overly affect how much energy is received, including how much is available for storage in the Pacific Warm Pool. What’s affected is primarily when the daily maximum is received, not the amount.

What ENSO does do is direct climate and weather patterns by when, where, and how it releases the stored energy. In the El Niño discharge phase it can release extra energy that is transported outside the Pacific tropics. But ENSO’s primary effects, to me, are expressed as the steering of currents of wind and water, the shifting of circulation patterns.

Thus ENSO does not represent a motive force, a driver, but a navigator.

Gail Combs says:
June 5, 2012 at 6:06 pm
Bye the Bye, Big oil is 100% behind CAGW and has been from the start. Maurice Strong, chair of the first Earth Summit, is BIG OIL and a senior advisor to the World Bank. Shell and BP funded CRU. Shell Oil exec Ged Davis is a big wig at IPCC. The former head of the IPCC, Robert Watson, works for the World Bank.
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A tax on CO2 is first and foremost a tax on coal. The cheapest, most readily available fuel source on the planet. The fuel that gave us the industrial revolution and is powering India and China out of poverty.

The CO2 tax is all about removing coal from the market. Pricing it out of existence so that oil will have a global monopoly. And once they have a monopoly, they will well and truly have us by the balls.

Richard Nelson says:
June 5, 2012 at 12:26 pm
Emitting massive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere is bad.
=========
Reality says otherwise. We are today feeding 7 billion people, where 60 years ago we had a whole lot more trouble feeding 3 billion. In that time we have emitted massive amounts of CO2.

This is only bad if you believe that people are the problem and thus feeding 7 billion is worse than starving the extra 4 billion we could never have fed 60 years ago, when crop failures and famine were common and global cooling was the fear.

davidmhoffer says:
June 5, 2012 at 2:07 pm
OK, I read the article twice and I am confused.

The way the explanation reads, they are publishing anomaly data but they change the base period against which the anomaly is calculated every few years. Please, someone tell me that I read that wrong. Please.

If we take a stock market index and then periodically adjust the base periods from which we define the baseline we can in fact make any stock, even those that are slightly declining, appear to rise (outperform the index). This may well be the motive as suggested by Mr Tisdale.

Is an index useful, though, and if so, for what purposes, and what purposes not? Surely if ENSO has a physical relationship to weather patterns, it makes most sense to use a physical measure. So is shifting to an index an indication that they believe that the ENSO-weather associations are just that, associations, not physicals processes?

In some sense I welcome an admission that “teleconnections” are largely just associations of one kind of pattern with another one and don’t reflect physics in and of themselves. But is ENSO just a predictive tool when it comes to weather outside the ENSO region, or are some physical links actually valid? In my mind it makes sense that ENSO would legitimately be physically linked to some things that it is statistically associated with.

yeah Mr Tisdale…i am with you…ENSO…which is a variation in an ocean current does seem to have far reaching effects…from the Asian monsoon to the Atlantic hurricane season…i would like to know why ENSO happens

NB: This mongraph is 224 pages and is not about climate science. The Russian edition was published in 2005. The English translation was published in 2007 and was edited by Gary Sharp, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study.

By analyzing numerous time series of empircal data (e.g., temperature records, sediment cores, fish catches, etc), they found that the earth has several global climate cycles with periodicities of 50-70 years and that the average of these cycles is about 60 years which has a cool and warm phase of 30 years each.

The last warm phase began in ca 1970-75 and ended in ca 2000. The global warming from ca 1975 was due in part to this warm phase. A cool phase started in 2000 and their stocastic model predicts that it will last until 2030.

NB: You should bookmark this page. This is _the_ one-stop-shop-until drop store for global warming and climate change info.

Briefly, they found no correlation between rising world fuel consumption and the global temperature anomaly over the interval 1961-2000.

The Russian have demolished the IPCC years ago. When their works become more well-known, the People will storm the UN and universities, capture the bureaucrats (i.e, con men) at the IPPC and climate scientists (i.e, the white-coated wiseguys) at the universities, douse’em with sweet Diesel and burn them all at the stake!.

Several years ago my only source of market information was the BBC World Service. Almost every day, it would tell me that sterling was down a touch against the euro. This was at a time when the pound was rising against the euro. Eventually I realised that the pound was being compared to its peak during the trading day, and therefore would almost always be lower in spite of the fact that over longer periods It was higher. What is the use of an index which misinforms?

ferd berple says:
June 5, 2012 at 9:09 pm
A tax on CO2 is first and foremost a tax on coal.
— — —
British Columbia, Canada has a Carbon (CO2) tax but uses little to no coal for energy use. Natural gas to warm our homes and gasoline to move our vehicles are the primary taxed fossil fuels. Our electricity comes from hydro dams and sometimes from natural gas.

Dang, going off topic again. I’m making amends by studying this post more intensely than I otherwise would, and other related topics that are your specialty Bob.

p.s.
The Burrard Generating Station is a 950 MW conventional natural gas-fired generating station. It plays an important role to provide back-up for the hydroelectric system during low water years, and also to provide transmission support and electrical supply security for the Lower Mainland (i.e. it provides supplementary power at peak demand periods and during interruptions in the grid). It may also be run steadily during periods when natural gas prices are relatively low, in order to save water storage at the dams for when electricity prices are higher.

Water temperatures are what they are. ENSO is not a water temperature. It is an oscillation in atmospheric currents. These oscillations are not directly dependent on changes in water temperatures. The relationship is relative.

For example: in warmer times, a temperature of ‘x’ in the Nino 3.4 region may be an indication that an El Nino is in progress. In cooler times, x minus 0.5 or x minus 1 could be an indication of an El Nino identical in strength to the one that produced the ‘x’ in warmer times.

The ONI is an index designed to identify ENSO strength. The strength of the ENSO phase is not a direct function of the Nino 3.4 water temperature, but, in part, a function of the Nino 3.4 water temperature relative to the rest of the environment.

Since the purpose of the index is to identify the strength of the ENSO event to help predict possible weather conditions in the seasons ahead, I can understand the need to adjust the baseline temperatures of the Nino 3.4 region. Without the adjustment, the strength of an El Nino or La Nino would be reported incorrectly, resulting in a less accurate seasonal forecast.

The index, with its floating baseline for Nino 3.4 temperatures, is not designed for global climate study and can not be used as a factor in determining changes in global temperature. Theoretically, the index would not even show a transition to the next ice age. It is up to those studying climate change to realize that they need to use the actual data and not the index to make any climate calculations.

you could illustrate the point even better by doing the same thing to global mean temps. If we use a similar shifting baseline we should be able to get rid of 1970-1998 warming trend and we can all forget about climate.
Seriously, doing that would point out how stupid and pointless any record of “anomalies” is when measured against a shifting baseline.

The Thermostat Hypothesis is that tropical clouds and thunderstorms actively regulate the temperature of the earth. This keeps the earth at a equilibrium temperature.

Thus it describes a truly global method of temperature regulation for the entire planet. ENSO operates in the Pacific tropics with effects that extend globally.

ENSO dictates where those thunderstorms occur in the tropical Pacific.

It influences where and when. If an area of water is too cold, the second phase of heat dumping to space by thunderstorm might not occur. In any case, there is enough solar radiation available to roast the Earth if clouds didn’t reflect about a third of it. ENSO would have to be causing some very cold water to prevent the first stage of sun-shielding cumulus cloud formation.

Now introduce the variations in trade wind strength dictated by ENSO. Trade wind strength varies the evaporation rate which control Willis’s discussion.

But the thunderstorms are self-generating and, more importantly, self-sustaining. Once they take off, the trade winds and their effect on the evaporation rate are hardly significant.

Ah heck with it. Let’s just write this off as a difference of perspective.

Jim Clarke says: “Since the purpose of the index is to identify the strength of the ENSO event to help predict possible weather conditions in the seasons ahead, I can understand the need to adjust the baseline temperatures of the Nino 3.4 region. Without the adjustment, the strength of an El Nino or La Nino would be reported incorrectly, resulting in a less accurate seasonal forecast.”

What is the evidence that the seasonal weather forecast skill is improved by doing this? What is the evidence that the relative strength of ENSO events (compared to a temporally “local” baseline) is a better weather predictor than absolute ENSO magnitude?

Jim Clarke says: “Water temperatures are what they are. ENSO is not a water temperature. It is an oscillation in atmospheric currents. These oscillations are not directly dependent on changes in water temperatures. The relationship is relative.”

Jim Clarke says: “For example: in warmer times, a temperature of ‘x’ in the Nino 3.4 region may be an indication that an El Nino is in progress. In cooler times, x minus 0.5 or x minus 1 could be an indication of an El Nino identical in strength to the one that produced the ‘x’ in warmer times.”

There is no global warming signal (“warmer times”) along the eastern equatorial Pacific, where the NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies are determined for ONI:
Sea surface temperatures there are primarily determined by the upwelled subsurface waters, with an occasional El Niño to raise them. Consider also, the entire Eastern Pacific Ocean, from pole to pole, has not warmed in 30 years.

Jim Clarke says: “The ONI is an index designed to identify ENSO strength.”

The heading of the ONI webpage disagrees with you. It reads “Cold & Warm Episodes By Season”. Strength is not mentioned on that webpage.

And of course the linear trends before and after the climate shift are negative, Figure 4-23, and that implies the climate shift is responsible for a good portion of the overall positive linear trend from 1950 to present.

No, don’t mealy-mouth it. Logically, it means the shift is responsible for ALL of the positive trend.

Funny thing these NASA-GISS/NCDC/NOAA (etc!) so-called “science” agencies and writers have about “flat-line” averages (that they “require” be steady across time – regardless of whatever they are pretending to measure) … Made only worse by their equal “requirement” that – if there is a change that they can plot or extrapolate – that linear trend “must” remain in place for the next 1000 years.

Or else, their Greenland ice cap will never melt.
Malaria can’t continue to increase.
Global temperatures cannot continue to expand the next 500 years the way they did for a brief period between 1973 and 1998.
The Arctic Ocean cannot boil away.
The hurricanes cannot keep increasing.